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Cell (2016) | Movie Review

I was surprised I didn’t know about this movie. When I saw that it was in fact a thing and starred names I recognised (John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson) I was shocked to say the least. Of course I had to check it out. Admittedly I went in without having read the book. I’m the first to say that you should read the book first, but in this case I didn’t, and I’m not sure if I’m happy about that fact or not. Let’s just say no matter how I felt about this movie, it didn’t put me off wanting to read the book.

You can watch the trailer here. Be aware there are some flashing images.

The book of the same name (by Stephen King) is definitely something that I want to read, and fortunately this movie didn’t change that for me, despite it not being a very good movie. Yeah, I didn’t particularly like it. The idea was good, and although critics have spoken poorly of the acting, I thought that was okay. By the end of the movie I simply wasn’t interested anymore, by the time we got there it felt like nothing had really happened, like we were only half way through. It carried well at first, set up decent characters and what seemed to be a good plot, but then anything interesting or seemingly important was rushed and squashed together, to the point that it felt like nothing happened at all.

Even if that hadn’t of been a problem, the one thing I really couldn’t get behind was the camera work. It seemed off, shaky, awkward, and not even in a good way. I remember one or two bits where the camera zoomed in, stopped as if it was stuck, and then zoomed in some more. There were other moments with different things, maybe it was camera work, maybe it was the editing, either way it wasn’t great and for some reason I noticed it a lot during the course of the movie.

Overall I’m glad I watched it, but it wasn’t perfect, and it was very lacking in places. It might have benefited from being spread out and bulked up a bit more in places.